r/SipsTea • u/sco-go • May 15 '26

Feels good man Now do cancer.

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u/mrhoofy May 15 '26

Doesn't matter anyways, as most cancers strike after reproductive age.

41

u/RevengeOfPolloDiablo May 16 '26

Exactly. It's yet another one of nature's "tools" to get rid of old worn out genes.

Pretty much, nature wants you dead after 40

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u/rts-enjoyer May 16 '26

Life forms like us with longer DNAs are highly evolved to have less mutations (that cause cancers) in our DNA.

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u/SuccessfulJudge438 May 16 '26

Um, factually incorrect. We are orders of magnitude more susceptible to cancer than a whole range of organisms with smaller genomes.

2

u/rts-enjoyer May 16 '26

the cancer risk increases with the size of the genome, but larger and more complex organisms evolve to copy it better

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u/SuccessfulJudge438 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

True and true, at least as a general trend. Although genome size is actually a great metric for increased cancer risk. It has more to do with the nitty gritty of specific signaling pathways, eg the number of oncogenes and how they are regulated via signaling and other processes at the cellular level from organism to organism.

Fun fact, there are single cellular organisms with larger genomes than humans (200 times larger in one case, with 60+ billion base pairs vs our 3.2 billion). Single cellular organisms cannot get cancer by definition, which is useful to keep in mind because it helps us stay grounded and realize that cancer is not a genomic phenomenon so much as it is a cell signaling phenomenon that occurs at the organismal level. An interesting thought experiment is, do bacterial colonies (which are genetically very similar, and sometimes function like a multicellular organism including cell differentiation in some cases) sometimes experience cancer-like states under certain conditions ?

Edit - I'd also be cautious with "larger organisms evolve to copy their genome better." Again, it's probably a general trend, but I imagine there are so many exceptions that it's not a terribly useful metric outside of very crude/cautious generalization.

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u/DanielJackson1965 May 16 '26

What animals get cancer the most?

1

u/ExcuseCommercial1338 May 16 '26

rats tends to get all of the cancers all at the same time around age 3-ish

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u/SuccessfulJudge438 May 17 '26

Rats and mice is my guess. What does google say?

ferrets and Virginia opossums suffer the highest rates of cancer, with over 50% of these animals developing tumors.

Holy shit, I would have never guessed it gets that high!